The Napoleonic troops invading Russia were waiting for an unpleasant surprise - on the banks of the full-flowing Berezina, where only a small town was located until recently, a formidable stronghold towered. "Not a single fortress was as useful to Russia as Bobruisk in 1812," wrote the first official historian of the Patriotic War V.N. Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky about its defense. In 1854, on the farthest western islands of the Russian Empire, the garrison of the unfinished fortress Bomarzund took an unequal battle.